AMD’s New Top-End: Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition

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You have to give AMD credit for its resilience. Strictly in terms of innovation, the company has been lagging behind Intel for a while now, getting a few swift kicks where the thermal grease don’t shine from releases like last year’s Core i7 line of Nehalem-architecture CPUs to run with the X58 chipset. AMD’s saving grace, with processors across the performance range, has been its pricefor a while now you’ve been able to get a top-performing AMD CPU for a lot less than you could a super-fast Intel one. But now Intel’s upcoming Core i5 chips and P55 chipset (with the capacity for Nvidia technology) promise to bring that Nehalem performance into the mainstreamand that could cause problems for price leader AMD.

Or maybe not. Undercutting the competition’s pricing structure is always extra sweet if you have additional room to maneuver. And if you thought AMD didn’t, based on its release of the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU back in April, think again. That 3.2-GHz, quad-core unlocked processor started at $250. The one AMD released today, the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, is priced only slightly lower ($245), but offers a slightly faster clock speed (3.4 GHz). If this isn’t primed to supercharge all the Dragon platform PCs out there, it should give a nice little nudge for performance junkies who really want every extra bit of speed they can get.

Don’t expect the 965 Black Edition to deliver much in the way of additional surprise, however. The silicon itself hasn’t changed at all from the 955, so most of the specs haven’t really changed that much. This maximum TDP on this chip is slightly higher (140W), however, and AMD estimates that its overall power draw shouldn’t be that much different from what the 955 put out. The company’s own testing suggests better overclocking; we imagine the extra 200MHz of stock speed probably doesn’t hurt much in that department.